The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
Routers exchange information in a network in order to determine how to forward packets to their respective destinations. The routers install this primary path routing information in forwarding data structures, and then retrieve it based on the destination address of a packet. However, the topology of a network is typically dynamic. Therefore, different paths through the network become available and unavailable. Rather than delaying until the routing in a network converges which may take a long time, routers often also install in the routing data structure routing information for a backup path for immediate use once the router detects a link or adjacent node failure.